Intersections of gender and race in the missionary correspondence of deaconess Anneliese Dörfer, East and South Africa, 1936-1967

Abstract:

This article traces the way Sister Anneliese Dörfer, a German deaconess, recorded and reported on constructions of gender and race during her thirty-year long interaction with Africans in the service of the Berlin Mission Society, first in British East Africa (1936-1940) and then in the northern Transvaal (now Limpopo Province), South Africa (1952-1967). Throughout this period, hierarchies seem to have been constructed in such ways that white women who wanted to build working relationships, or friendships, with black women and men, required a realization of the restrictions associated with their gender, as well as the privileges conjoined to their whiteness. By transgressing some and embracing others of the "rules" imposed by colonial society and the state, white women could broaden their playing fields to a significant extent. As has been argued by Deborah Gaitskell, religion was the one field in particular in which the growing racial divides of the twentieth century could be overcome. Initially, in her early correspondence back to Germany, Dörfer expressed the desire to become as black as the members of her African congregations. She soon had to learn that "becoming black" was unimaginable not only to the colonial officials and her male missionary employers, but also to the African congregations she was trying to integrate into. Through the years the realization came that it was not by becoming black, but by putting the privilege of whiteness at the disposal of African communities, that trans-racial friendships had value for Christians categorised as black.